I spent four years as Forbes' Girl Friday, which to me meant doing a little bit of everything at once. As a member of the Forbes Entrepreneurs team, I looked at booming business and startup life with a female gaze. I worked on the PowerWomen Wealth and Celebrity 100 lists, keeping my ears pricked and pen poised for current event stories--from political sex scandals to celebrity gossip to international affairs. In 2012 I helped to put two South American women on the cover of FORBES Magazine: Modern Family star Sofia Vergara (the top-earning actress on U.S. television) and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who is transforming the BRIC nation into an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Prior to Forbes I was at the Philadelphia CityPaper, where I learned more than any girl ever needs to know about the city's seedier trades. I studied digital journalism at The University of The Arts.
I left Forbes in November, 2013, to pursue other interests on the West Coast.

The staffs of Portland-based Geoloqi and Redlands-based Esri will combine to form a new Research and Development Center in Portland where the merging of Geoloqi products into Esri’s geographic platform will be used to create and develop new product sets for the company. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but the deal has been in the works since 2011 when Case and Esri staffers met at a developers conference in Portland.

“We are excited to have the team at Geoloqi and its technology become a part of the Esri family,” said Jack Dangermond, Esri’s president in a statement. “Geoloqi’s capabilities and relationships with the developer community will build on Esri’s already impressive suite of ArcGIS products to create more dynamic mobile and web applications.”

Case and cofounder Aaron Parecki weren’t looking to sell when they first met the Esri staff and considered joining forces on a potential project basis. But as customers began asking for geo-coding capability—technology, Case says, that would have stretched her staff of seven and financial resources to the limits. After some thinking, it was decision time. “There were a lot of interested investors,” Case remembers, “And it was pretty much either take money from investors who said they could help us or take a merging investment from Esri who we knew could help us.”

“Esri is the company that Geoloqi wanted to be when we grew up,” says Case with a laugh, exuding excitement over the new direction of her two-year old company. Esri, for the uninitiated, is a market leader in geo-planning software, and has been helping companies and organizations track activity through geographic knowledge since 1969. Planning on opening a strip mall? Esri can provide thousands of data-points to help you pick the best stretch of highway—from foot traffic to real estate costs to per-capita spending. Looking for the political activity by congressional district? They do that too. (Full disclosure: they also help FORBES with some of our city-based lists).

Case and Parecki built Geoloqi to use geographical data with more of a “for the people” approach—although over the past 12 months enterprise clients did get on board. The platform allows developers (and neophytes like me) to create real-time location-based alerts and applications for smart phones. It provides a full tool-kit for tracking, messaging and “geo-fencing” through mobile devices. What does that mean? That my grocery list hits my iPhone every time I step into the ShopRite, and if my sister ever enters my ‘hood I’m the first to know. (One person’s creepiness is another’s awesome technology, don’t judge).

As acquisitions go, Case makes it sound like her decision to sell to Esri has been as positive as they come. The integration has been in place since September and she says she feels her mission to develop geo-based tools has been reinvigorated. “We’re super inspired to work. We started coming in earlier. Our creative energy has come back tenfold.” She’s not even sad, she says, to lose the CEO title (“I’m a director now and it feels great”) or the Geoloqi name (over coming months the company branding will be replaced by Esri’s). “We’ve got too much to focus on over the next few years.

Like what? The first joint release with Esri is a geocoding service that launches today on the Geoloqi API. “Then we’re working to make geo-triggers based on physical addresses rather than map coordinates of latitude and longitude,” she says, which can often be confusing both to people and computers. But beyond that she looks forward to creating next-generation tools to allow both companies and individuals do better work. “Consider the possibilities in healthcare,” she muses. “Say letting a healthcare provider know when a patient hasn’t left her house in a week. These are tools that can do a lot of good, and putting our technology alongside Esri’s is going to get us there.”

“Esri has the nouns and adjectives of geographic software—they’ve got maps and data down—they can describe those things and put them to use for thousands of customers. But we have the verbs—we’re mobile and real-time,” Case says. “Really it’s a beautiful match.”

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“Esri has the nouns and adjectives of geographic software—they’ve got maps and data down—they can describe those things and put them to use for thousands of customers. But we have the verbs—we’re mobile and real-time,” Case says. “Really it’s a beautiful match.”